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And both starring in movies that open today. Gwyneth Paltrow stars in
“Country Strong,” and Nicolas Cage goes back to the Middle Ages in
“Season of the Witch” (which wasn’t screened for critics).

The time is ripe for a deeper look at these stars. They both won Academy
Awards when they were relatively young — he was 32, and she was 26 —
but they have handled their post-Oscar careers quite differently.

Gwyneth Paltrow

It says much about Paltrow’s skills as an actress that in the early years of her career many of us thought she was British.

After all, this slim, pale blonde wowed audiences as the busybody heroine of
Jane Austen’s “Emma,” played a love-challenged Londoner in “Sliding
Doors” and won her Oscar as an Elizabethan in 1998’s “Shakespeare in
Love,” all the while sporting a Brit accent.

Smoke and mirrors.

In fact, Paltrow is about as American as they come. Born in 1972, she grew
up in Los Angeles and Massachusetts as the daughter of Tony-winning
actress Blythe Danner (the “Fockers” franchise) and producer/director
Bruce Paltrow (TV’s “St. Elsewhere”).

Though reared around actors, Paltrow went to college intending to major in art history. Deciding that she couldn’t get acting out of her system, she went into the family
business.

One of her first jobs was playing the young Wendy in
“Hook,” Steven Spielberg’s 1991 update of “Peter Pan.” For the next five
years she took small roles, getting accustomed to the requirements of
screen acting and finally gaining a degree of public recognition with
her performance as Brad Pitt’s wife in the dark 1995 thriller “Seven.”

Defining Paltrow’s career isn’t easy because of her willingness to shift between
big-budget studio projects and artistically challenging independent
fare.

Thus she has appeared in studio comedies opposite Jack
Black (“Shallow Hal”) and Mike Myers (“Austin Powers in Goldmember”),
and her character Pepper Potts has become an essential element of the
“Iron Man” franchise — an element that reportedly will be sadly absent
when Iron Man joins “The Avengers” in 2012.

But her resume is dotted with films clearly done for the love of acting — titles like
“Proof,” “Sylvia,” “Bounce,” “Hard Eight” — and especially “Running With
Scissors” and Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” two films in which
she deftly used her cool sexuality to plumb the humor and horrors of
eccentric upper-middle-class America.

No actor expects projects
like these to be big moneymakers, yet these marginal titles make up half
of Paltrow’s credits, suggesting a longing to stretch her acting
muscles that’s not often satisfied by the Hollywood hit machine.

In 1996 she starred in “Emma,” which paved the way for her Oscar-winning
role in “Shakespeare in Love” two years later. It was in many ways a
once-in-a-lifetime role that allowed her to blend sensuality with
lightheartedness (she wore a fake mustache for several scenes) while
portraying a proto-feminist head over heels in love.

Paltrow started dabbling in the musical genre after her Oscar. She did her own
singing in “Duets,” a 2000 film about a karaoke competition directed by
her father (and co-starring Huey Lewis).

This fall she sang at the Country Music Association Awards and guest-starred on TV’s “Glee,” performing her own musical numbers (she’ll reprise her role in the
post-Super Bowl episode Feb. 6). And on Jan. 15, she’ll host “Saturday
Night Live” with musical guest Cee-Lo, whose song “Forget You” she
covered on “Glee.”

Her new movie, “Country Strong,” finds her singing and acting the role of an alcoholic country music star trying to
get back into the big time.

Early on her personal life played out
in the gossip columns, thanks to boyfriend Ben Affleck and fiancé Brad
Pitt, but her seven-year marriage to Coldplay front man Chris Martin
(they have two children) seems like the real deal. While Paltrow has
since stayed out of the tabs, she has taken to the Web in her own way,
creating the lifestyle blog Goop.com.

In the meantime, Paltrow has become a solid actress as comfortable with comedic repartee as histrionics. But is she a true movie star?

Probably not. It’s uncertain how many of us get excited at the prospect of “a Gwyneth Paltrow movie.” Her name alone is rarely enough to put bodies in the
seats.

On the other hand, beginning with “Shakespeare in Love”
Paltrow has shown an uncanny knack for picking the right ensemble
projects that do not rely on her alone for their success but provide
her with several juicy scenes.

She may not be an individual star, but she’s a terrific team player.

An actress could do worse.

Nicolas Cage

Cage has greatness in him. Which is why his recent choices bug the heck out of his admirers.

Of course with that greatness comes a good dose of madness. In his salad
days that weirdness was on full display in films such as “Vampire’s
Kiss” (for which he scarfed down a live cockroach) and David Lynch’s
“Wild at Heart” (he played a fugitive criminal and Elvis impersonator;
Lynch called him “the jazz musician of acting”).

But the post-Oscar Cage has papered over his more bizarre traits, remaking
himself as the sort of bankable star the studios are comfortable with.

It’s probably good for his wallet. Less so for his art.

He was born Nicolas Coppola 47 years ago today — Jan. 7, 1964, in Long Beach, Calif. Coppola as in Francis Ford Coppola, his uncle.

He dropped out of high school to pursue acting and changed his name so
that any success that came his way would be because of his own talent
rather than his famous name. He named himself after Luke Cage, a
third-tier Marvel Comics superhero.

He started out playing sleepy-eyed adolescent hoodlums (“Valley Girl,” “Rumble Fish”), then honed that approach as a volatile one-handed baker opposite Cher in the 1987 Oscar hit “Moonstruck.” That performance brought him mainstream
recognition.

He tackled comedy as a desperate husband-to-be in
“Honeymoon in Vegas” (’92). At the time I described him as “the most
unlikely leading man in American films. He’s tall, skinny, has thinning
hair, a Gandy Goose nose and the hangdog expression of an abused basset
hound.” But he was terrifically funny.

He won his Oscar for playing an alcoholic drinking himself to death in the company of a Sin City hooker in 1995’s “Leaving Las Vegas.” It remains Cage’s single
greatest performance, one in which he could draw on his actorly
idiosyncrasies while keeping them in check. Drunk roles are notorious
for encouraging overacting, but Cage gave a sad, haunting performance of
genuine restraint.

If “Vegas” was a career high point, it was also a turning point. In subsequent roles Cage would move away from the dangerous edge that marked his early work. Astonishingly, this skinny, balding “Gandy Goose” transformed himself (with the help of a personal trainer and an impressive hair weave) into a bulked-up action star for “Con Air.”

If his goal was to achieve bankability, it worked. Cage
is a genuine movie star whose name can be enough to attract an
audience.

Cage appears to be a man of furious passions. He so
insistently wooed his first wife, actress Patricia Arquette, that she
became frightened and avoided him for years before finally succumbing.
His short-lived second marriage was to Lisa Marie Presley, the only
child of his musical idol.

Since 2004 he has been married to Alice Kim Cage, whom he met while she was waitressing at a sushi bar. They have one child; Cage also has a grown son by a former girlfriend.

But it’s also said of Cage that in choosing projects he asks to see the
check before the screenplay. In recent years he has made a film every
three months; perhaps facing a $6 million IRS tax lien has something to
do with it.

Many of his titles of the last decade are instantly
forgettable (“The Weather Man,” “Windtalkers”) and some are
embarrassments (“The Wicker Man,” “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”).

He has found a new franchise in the “National Treasure” series, which
requires little of him but generates a thus-far reliable money stream.

Still, every now and then we see flashes of the old, dangerous,
tightrope-walking Nicolas Cage. His costume-wearing vigilante in last
year’s “Kick-Ass,” for example, or the self-destructive cop of “The Bad
Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans” (2009). And let’s not forget his
wonderful work as neurotic twin screenwriters in “Adaptation” (2002).

In films like these Cage seems to be not a slumming star delivering
self-parody but a filmic force of nature — funny, furious and moving in
unexpected ways.

-- Edited by Lady Trueheart on Sunday 9th of January 2011 04:48:16 PM